DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.

12336

BOOK REVIEWS

THE SLEEPING SOVEREIGN. THE INVENTION OF MODERN DEMOCRACY

By Richard Tuck

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016. 310 pages including index. ISBN 110713014X.

Over the past few years a number of monographs have subjected the idea of sovereignty – a pivotal notion of moder-
nity and yet one of the most elusive in our legal and political vocabulary – to fresh thinking. Amid revived populisms
on both sides of the Atlantic claiming to make the people truly sovereign against political and economic elites, and
in the age of increasingly constrained national sovereignties around the globe, political theorists have been mapping
the semantic transformations, normative assumptions, and polemical implications of the category of sovereignty from
various perspectives.
The latest book by Richard Tuck makes an original contribution to this ongoing renaissance of sovereignty. It draws
on intellectual history, the history of ideas, and the history of political thought to offer a much-needed genealogy
distinguishing between the concepts of sovereignty and government – a distinction that, on his reading, represents
a fundamental, and yet underexplored, aspect of our political imagination. Originally delivered in 2012 as the John
Robert Seeley Lectures at the University of Cambridge, the four chapters of the book shed light on a distinctive set of
authors – from Bodin (I), to Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf (II), up through late 18th -century France (III) and America
(IV) – with a view to thinking more carefully about the forms of popular sovereignty in early 21st -century democracies.
The title of the book comes from a passage of De Cive, where Hobbes claimed that “the intervals between meetings of
the citizens may be compared to the times when a Monarch is asleep; for the power is retained though there are no
acts of commanding.” The argument that government is not the staple of sovereign power was profoundly revolution-
ary in the mid-17th century, though Hobbes's primary goal was to defend the prerogatives of the Kings of England. The
Sleeping Sovereign retrieves the long history of debates over the distinction between sovereignty and government to
examine both the transformations of this dualism across the centuries and its implications for how we conceptualize
and experience democratic sovereignty in contemporary constitutional theory and practice. As we read in the “Pref-
ace,” Hobbes's analogy between the democratic sovereign and the sleeping monarch “is one of the first full accounts
of how we might think about democracies to be found in the literature of political theory after the disappearance of
the ancient republics” (p. ix). The Hobbesian intuition ran throughout the experiences of practical constitution-making
in revolutionary France and America, where, as Tuck notes, what was unprecedented was not only the creation of the
first written constitutions but, most importantly, the codification of the law-making power of a fleeting institution that
would retire into the shadows throughout the ordinary life of the body politic. Opposed by Sieyès, this idea was cham-
pioned by Rousseau and the Girondins as well as, at least at the state level, by the American founders, who, like their
French contemporaries, had a plebiscitary understanding of popular sovereignty via constitutional plebiscites.
The whole book pivots around Rousseau. The four chapters offer a look both backwards and forwards – from
Rousseau back to Bodin and the natural law theorists, and from Rousseau up through the late 18th century and then to
contemporary debates on constitutionalism and popular sovereignty. Rousseau is the hero of this long history because
of his capacity to turn Hobbes's analogy into a distinctive vision of the political process – a vision, Tuck claims, that
interpreters have often misunderstood precisely because of the insufficient attention they have paid to his distinction
between sovereignty and government.
In 1764, two years after the publication of The Social Contract and in opposition to the nostalgia for ancient Athenian
democracy, Rousseau argued that a democratic republic does not necessarily entail a democratic government. Accord-
ing to his 1762 masterpiece, theorizing the creation of the basic legal framework of the republic (sovereignty) and the

Constellations. 2017;24:650–656. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cons 

c 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 650
BOOK REVIEWS 651

ordinary process of decision-making (government) as two distinct powers was the secret to make democracy a viable
option in the modern world. More specifically, Rousseau's constitutional restructuring envisioned “a new way of think-
ing about democracy” that was unsettlingly “non-deliberative” (pp. 3–5). By excluding collective deliberation from the
sphere of government and turning popular sovereignty into the exercise of a binding judgment on a prearranged set of
questions, Rousseau eventually reconceptualized democracy as an act rather than a process, based on the primacy of
the vote (rather than discussion) as the quintessential power of democratic citizens. To him, this was both the antidote
to the rise of “partial associations” dismembering the republic from within and the necessary precondition for unbiased
decision-making.
Tuck scrutinizes Rousseau's claim that none of those who have spoken about the democratic Constitution “have
sufficiently distinguished the Sovereign from the Government” (Eight Letter Written from the Mountain) and that, in the
state, “government [is] improperly confused with the Sovereign, of which it is merely the minister” (The Social Con-
tract). However, what Rousseau so emphatically presented as his own contribution to modern political theory – and
this is one of the main claims of The Sleeping Sovereign – was hardly new. On Tuck's reading, the differentiation between
sovereignty and government had been introduced two centuries earlier by Bodin in the 1560s and 1570s, but it had
later fallen into oblivion for its potentially disruptive implications. More specifically, its original context was Bodin's
critique of Aristotle. In a cryptic passage of Politics III.7, Aristotle had argued that “the politeuma, which is the dominant
part of a city, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many” (p. 12); additionally, both in III.6 and III.7, he
had presented the terms “politeuma” and “politeia” as interchangeable. In Tuck's words, “Bodin's objection … was not
that Aristotle had no concept of sovereignty, but that he was not clear about what it meant to be ‘dominant’ in a city”
(pp. 12–13). These few elusive lines of Politics had already been a matter of dispute before Bodin. Most often, transla-
tors had preferred to avoid the interpretational dilemma either by leaving “politeia” and “politeuma” simply untrans-
lated or by rendering “politeuma” as “ruling class” (ordo dominantium in Aquinas's commentary). After Leonardo Bruni,
the mid-1430s author of the first Humanist translation of Politics, it was Jacques d'Estrebay who, in 1542 established
for the first time what would later become the most common translation of the terms “politeia” and “politeuma” in Latin
(respublica and administratio, respectively), describing two different spheres of action.
The Sleeping Sovereign shows that Bodin's was a distinctive new voice in the plethora of conflicting views that devel-
oped in the early modern age around this interpretative puzzle and its constitutional implications. His contribution
was distinctive and unsettling. To him, the theory of the mixed constitution epitomized the monstrosity of the end-
less failures to differentiate between the contingent form of governmental power (the trustees and custodians) from
the underlying, perennial, and immutable locus of sovereignty. More specifically, as Tuck shows, he turned on its head
the standard Humanistic interpretation of the Roman Constitution as a virtuous paradigm of mixed government that
post-Reformation Europe ought to embrace. The difference between laws (leges) and edicts (edicta) that he traced in
Les Six Livres de la République (1576) revolved around the difference between the supposed and the real locus of polit-
ical power, between the general source of sovereignty and the specific operations of government, and it was framed
within a broader attempt to redefine the legitimacy of political institutions: laws emanate from the sovereign, edicts
emanate from the magistrates. It was through the lens of this overlooked distinction that Bodin offered an unconven-
tional reading of Roman constitutional history as the life and times of a democratic state that had undergone signifi-
cant transformations over the centuries but never renounced to its intrinsically democratic character. For Tuck, Bodin's
reading of ancient Rome suggested, to later debates on democracy, one key point: democratic government, not demo-
cratic sovereignty, is the Achilles's heel of democratic states, which are periodically undermined by the instability of
the former rather than the legal framework outlined by the latter.
At this level, The Sleeping Sovereign makes a twofold contribution, both historical and historiographical. Through the
lens of the distinction between sovereignty and government, Tuck questions the standard scholarly account of Bodin's
thought. Rather than being an uncontroversial defender of the French monarchy and a champion of the paradigm of
legislative absolutism against the prerogatives of the Estates General and the courts, Bodin was, according to The Sleep-
ing Sovereign, a theorist of modern resistance (a reading that remained hegemonic until the early 18th century). This is
also, it claims, how he was seen by his contemporaries. According to Tuck, Bodin's distinction between sovereignty and
government was truly the staple of a new theory of political legitimacy particularly suited for modern states.
652 BOOK REVIEWS

Two minor points – one textual and one historiographical – are worth mentioning, about Rousseau and Bodin,
respectively. On p. 9, Tuck quotes from the fourth paragraph of The Social Contract Book III, Chapter 1: “‘government’
is ‘often wrongly confused with the Sovereign, whose minister it is’” (my emphasis). Based on this line, Tuck draws the
conclusion that it “suggests that he [Rousseau] recognized that sometimes it had not been wrongly confused” (p. 9) and
that “he must in fact have been well aware that he was not the first person to use [the distinction]” (p. 8). However,
the Cambridge edition of The Social Contract, edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch and referenced by Tuck as his
chosen version (p. 4 n. 3), never mentions “often” in its translation of the line quoted by Tuck. (Interestingly, Tuck does
not provide any specific page reference for the passage that he quotes on p. 9.) The original French passage from Du
Contrat Social reads as follows: “Voilà quelle est dans l'Etat la raison du Gouvernement, confondu mal à propos avec le
Souverain, dont il n'est que le ministre” (“mal à propos” is best translated as “inappropriately” or “improperly”: it does
not have the same meaning as “often wrongly confused”). Finally, Tuck references two recent contributions by Daniel
Lee and Kinch Hoekstra as examples of how Bodin's use of the distinction between sovereignty and government “is
beginning to attract the attention of scholars after many years of neglect” (p. 10 n. 9). While both Lee and Hoekstra
have indeed done well to retrieve an aspect of Bodin's political theory that had long gone unnoticed, it is not superflu-
ous to recall an important precedent that The Sleeping Sovereign does not mention. Four decades ago, Norberto Bobbio,
the most important political and legal theorist of 20th -century Italy, usually known to Anglo-American scholars for his
translated writings on democracy as well as on the natural law tradition, engaged extensively with Bodin's distinction
between sovereignty and government, to which he devoted an entire chapter in his classic book Theories of Forms of Gov-
ernment in the History of Political Thought (1976). Reading Bobbio would probably have not changed the core of Tuck's
historical and textual account, but it would have perhaps made his historiographical vision clearer and more complete.

David Ragazzoni
Columbia University

AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY

David Ragazzoni is a PhD student in Political Theory at the Department of Political Science of Columbia University,
New York.

DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12335

EUROPE'S FUNCTIONAL CONSTITUTION

By Turkuler Isiksel

Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016. 304 pages including index. ISBN 019875907X.

Functional approaches have always assumed a pivotal role in research on European integration. The vast literature
on Europe's democratic path and steps towards democratization began to emerge only in the 1990s. Before this demo-
cratic focus in European studies, most approaches to European integration consciously displayed a functionalist bias. In
the 1950s and 1960s German ordoliberals like Alfred Müller-Armack and Hans Peter Ipsen advocated a common mar-
ket, deriving its legitimation from expected gains in terms of economic growth. To them, Europe's institutional struc-
tures had to be curtailed in order to correct market failures and guarantee the free circulation of goods, capital, and
labour. As Florian Rödl has shown in an important article on Europe's Labour Constitution, the Keynesian camp, based
primarily in France and Italy, was more ambitious, arguing that European integration ought to mitigate economic diver-
gences and allow for a pathway to shared economic prosperity. In order to achieve these ends, more robust forms of
supranational coordination and even redistribution were deemed necessary. Moreover, the neo-Marxist approaches
BOOK REVIEWS 653

that dominated European university departments from the 1970s onwards provided a vast range of sophisticated
explanations for the emergence of European integration. While authors such as Ernest Mandel considered the pur-
pose of the European Economic Community was to coordinate the interests of a European capitalist class in the form
of a nascent supranational state, others—such as Nicos Poulantzas or the French regulation school—identified it as the
internationalization of the state, which transferred some state functions to the European level and thereby created a
new terrain for hegemonic contestation between different classes.
In Europe's Functional Constitution, Turkuler Isiksel seeks to revitalize functional vocabularies and demonstrate their
relevance to the state of the EU. She analyses the evolution of Europe's legal and political institutions and identi-
fies functional normativity as the driving force behind European integration. From the outset, she argues, all steps
towards further integration—whether there were the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and monetary union, intensified eco-
nomic and fiscal integration in the wake of the Euro crisis since 2010, or growing competence in other non-economic
policy fields such as welfare or non-discrimination—reiterate the functional logic of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Accord-
ing to Isiksel, the EU “still follows the blueprint of functional constitutionalism established by the 1957 Treaty of
Rome” (p. 19).
To substantiate her argument, she begins from a recalibrated perspective on constitutionalism, bemoaning the cir-
cumstance that the recent debate on supra-national and transnational constitutionalization suffers from a reductionist
bias focused solely on democratic participation and the (re-)distribution of rights. In her view, the picture is more com-
plex, to the extent that constitutions and the legal form do not necessarily safeguard democratic self-determination,
but are an essential mechanism of “governing effectively” (p. 32). It is precisely through constitutionalization, that is,
the interplay of high-ranking constituting and restraining mechanisms (Isiksel calls these “enabling constraints,” p. 32),
that political and legal power can be enabled. Against this backdrop, Isiksel portrays European integration as a type of
functional constitutionalism. Most importantly, the EU neither replicates the sovereignty-based political constitution
of the nation-state in a sort of super-state, nor does it amount to a federated union. Rather, the EU is a “particular kind
of political regime” (p. 73) which provides “its own pattern of justification;” namely economic development and growth
through the “free movement of persons, services and capital” (Treaty of Rome).
Isiksel then analyses different periods of European integration over subsequent chapters. Echoing integration-
through-law approaches, she meticulously discusses the adjudication of the European Court of Justice and its role in
bolstering the common market. She illustrates how the European Court of Justice and the various steps in reforming
the treaties have increasingly bestowed citizens with robust agency. However, Europe's fundamental freedoms con-
tinue to revolve around engagement in economic cross-border and commercial activity, not around political partici-
pation or human rights, which she claims “radiate out of the economic union” (p. 79). Isiksel acknowledges that the
European process has also fostered the dissemination of fundamental and democratic rights. In this sense, the vast lit-
erature on deliberative democracy, citizenship, and legal integration is deemed to be correct in stressing the empower-
ment of individual and collective agency on the European level, but wrong for failing to see that all these developments
are overdetermined by a functional normativity.
Isiksel's book is written with the clear intention of opposing the idealization of supra-national and transnational
constitutionalism as potential forerunners of democratization. She soberly concludes that the EU “hardly adds up to a
supranational democracy” (p. 213). The book warns that, given its deep entanglement in functional normativity, “con-
stitutionalism is not emancipatory per se” (p. 219). Isiksel ends with a radical conclusion which—in all its sobriety—
expresses a forceful assumption that already plays an important role in political life: namely, that all attempts to
transcend or overcome Europe's functional constitution from within seem prone to fail because they tend to repli-
cate its inner core—a sort of economic “overdetermination in the last instance” (Louis Althusser). Instead, to Isiksel,
it seems vital to “articulate the value of European Integration in terms other than the economic” and invent “other
horizons” (p. 231).
Although it does not explicitly conclude with a normative agenda, the book raises the question of how to deal with
the EU's functional legacy. Given that management of the Euro and migration crises has intensified functional cooper-
ation in crucial areas such as fiscal policies and border control, it seems worth revisiting the way that the functionalist
654 BOOK REVIEWS

strand has evolved over recent decades and assessing how it has cast respective efforts towards European integra-
tion. Nowadays, we tend to overlook the fact that the founders of the Treaties of Rome, the bureaucrats of common
agricultural policies, or the legal engineers of rights adjudication were not simply technocrats investing their efforts in
a type of functional normativity as an end unto itself. Rather, even functional technocracy on the European level was
deeply embedded in social and political conflict in the post-war era: ordoliberals always saw market rationality not as
an end unto itself, but as an instrument for a well-ordered society which maintains a healthy distance from both real-
existing socialism and state interventionism. In turn, Keynesians sought to establish at least some mechanisms—such
as in the field of economic coordination or employment policies—that could intervene in economic affairs and thereby
guarantee a degree of economic stability and social welfare. Furthermore, the political left (broadly conceived) has
always discussed how the left can relate to Europe's economic constitution. Federalists and reformers such as Altiero
Spinelli or the Italian Communist Party of the 1970s tended to support strengthening the EU in order to establish
a third power bloc in world politics. Ernest Mandel and André Gorz, who initially adhered to a strictly functionalist
account of the EU, viewed its development towards a supranational capitalist state as a potential trigger for the advent
of social counter-movements that could, in turn, replace Europe's market-oriented liberal constitution.
Without going into the details of all these varieties, it is worth noting that they went beyond a mere emphasis on
output legitimacy. Rather, the respective conceptions diverged and were embedded in a broader landscape of polit-
ical strategy, assumptions about social causation, and institutional engineering. Beneath the surface of technocratic
management, functionalist approaches pursued hidden political agendas.
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, however, European integration researchers discovered that the strategic use
of functional constitutionalism proved to be highly problematic. Once set in motion, Europe's functional constitution
tended to realize a self-referential bias that exceeded the control of the member states and relevant factions of
the bureaucratic elite. Ordoliberals promoted the narrow vision of the common market, but could not prevent the
European layer from intervening in the sovereignty of member states and accruing crucial competences. Keynesians
have always been optimistic about more centralized power on the European level, but the gradual steps towards a
fiscal constitution were taken under the auspices of austerity and anti-Keynesian fiscal discipline. The European Court
of Justice supported economic integration and fundamental market freedoms, but their rulings produced side-effects
in social and non-discrimination policies at the same time. The attempt to advance political objectives by means of
functional constitutionalism was self-defeating: on one hand, it established a powerful market-liberal nexus that
is constantly replicated. On the other, it created a complex terrain following its own obstinate logic and regularly
exhausting popular political ambitions.
In this sense, Isiksel's analysis could lead us to reassess Europe's functional constitution not only in descriptive, but
also in political, normative, and strategic terms.
If it is true that the EU's inner core is unresponsive to a democratization that applies normative standards, it might
more promising to redirect or even subvert the functional constitution from within. Instead of reforming the political
order through a strengthened parliament, plebiscitary mechanisms or constitutional renewal, changes in three major
technocratic realms could exert transformative effects: The first is monetary and fiscal regulation. Here, the revocation
or neutralization of austerity as an overarching value could open up alternative economic pathways. The second is
Europe's legal dimension. A further judicialization of social rights on the European level could undermine the dominant
adjudication between market and liberal rights of by the European Court of Justice. The third is managing migration.
A financial redistribution mechanism that allowed incoming refugees to choose where to apply for legal status and,
concomitantly, provided financial support to the member states according to their welcome-quota, could prove to be
efficient in generating a movement to counter the rising forces of isolation and closed borders (and produce important
economic side-effects). In the light of the political tensions and blockades arising on the European level, democratic
forces are ill-advised to dismiss Europe's functional legitimacy as a potential terrain for social change.

Kolja Möller
University of Bremen
BOOK REVIEWS 655

AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY

Kolja Möller is a post-doctoral researcher at the research unit “Transnational Force of Law”, Centre of European Law
and Politics, University of Bremen, and a visiting professor in Constitutional Theory at Dresden Technical University.

DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12337

ARENDTIAN CONSTITUTIONALISM. LAW, POLITICS AND THE ORDER OF FREEDOM

By Christian Volk

Hart, Oxford. 2015. 304 pages including index. ISBN 019875907X.

In recent decades Hannah Arendt has come to be recognized as one of the most important political thinkers of the
20th century; consequently, the literature on her work has grown steadily. To date, Arendt's work has primarily been
associated with themes such as beginning, natality, or spontaneity. For this reason, her theory became the reference
of choice for positions that emphasize the significance of civil society or radical democracy and maintain a skeptical
distance from the institutional dimension of politics.
Christian Volk offers a different view. According to Volk, these interpretations have neglected Arendt's interest in
the conditions required for the stability and durability of a free constitution. His account of Arendt's political theory,
based on his doctoral thesis in German, which is now available in a revised and extended English translation, brings
to the fore what had been widely overlooked: Arendt's constitutionalism and her reflections on the relation between
politics and law.
He develops his interpretation in five chapters. The first two deal with Arendt's discussion of the paradoxes of the
nation-state and the concept of the nation. In reconstructing Arendt's analysis of the crisis of the European nation-
state between the two world wars, Volk presents the basic line of argument that led Arendt to focus on the problem
of political order and on the conditions for its realization. In the European nation-states it was the paradox of attempt-
ing to establish stability by excluding ethnic minorities from citizenship that caused the system to fail. By depriving
people of fundamental rights and leaving them without protection against arbitrary rule, conditions were created that
made possible the catastrophe of totalitarian domination, which culminated in the Gulag and the Holocaust. Although
Arendt's analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism belongs to her better-known works, Volk offers new insights by link-
ing the problem of totalitarianism to a reconstruction of Arendt's understanding of the nation as a politico-theoretical
concept. Drawing on Arendt's interpretations of the French Revolution and of Rousseau, Volk discusses the problem-
atic foundations of modern democracy in the form of the nation-state—a concept that, by linking self-determination
and political autonomy to social and cultural homogeneity, potentially destroys the political freedom it tries to estab-
lish. He devotes particular attention to what Robespierre called the “patriotism of the heart,” since it marks a process
that Volk calls the “internalisation of the political” (p. 74)—the attempt to create stability by rooting political order in
the individual's cultural beliefs and emotional attitudes. However, this attempt to create the prerequisites for bringing
about a general will is deeply hostile to plurality and the existence of differences in the body politic. Nor does it lead to
a public space where free citizens can meet, but, instead, encourages a retreat into a purely subjective attitude towards
politics and thus to a negation of the political.
According to Arendt, the most problematic aspect of the conceptual language of the nation-state and of the general
will is that it leaves no space for the autonomy of law and the Constitution. In his discussion of the influence of Max
Weber's sociology of law and the modern state, Volk draws a new and interesting comparison between Weber and
Arendt. By showing that Arendt's reflections are not specifically rooted in ancient philosophy, but rather bear strong
traces of contemporary discourse, Volk helps us grasp the originality of her analysis of totalitarianism, her account of
the political, and her genealogy of modern domination. For Volk, Weber “seems to be the impulse behind countless
sections of [The Origins of Totalitarianism]: from the critique of parties and parliament, to his thoughts on economic
656 BOOK REVIEWS

history and his examination of the law” (p. 99). According to Volk, the most important conceptual bridge between
Weber and Arendt is to be found in their discussions of bureaucracy as a form of rule. Arendt calls this phenomenon
one of the major pathologies of the modern state because, by cutting its link to the political, bureaucratic rule trans-
forms law into a means of domination that destroys the very possibility of a constitutional order of liberty. By recon-
structing this somewhat obscure thread of her argument, Volk is certainly not trying to turn Arendt into a standard
liberal. Rather, the main question Arendt raises as a constitutional thinker is how can law and the political be linked in
a different way from the asymmetric model of bureaucratic domination in which the presumed rationality of the law
makes political participation impossible? Following Arendt, Volk discusses two possibilities. The first is the idea of pop-
ular sovereignty, which, in her accounts of the French Revolution and of Rousseau, she criticizes as a dead end. This
model sees political liberty as creating a hierarchical relation between the national will and its expression in law. As a
result, not only is the autonomy of the Constitution replaced by a relation of dependence in which the will embodies
the only legitimate resource of the political, but this kind of order also leads to the alienation of its citizens because the
proclaimed superiority of the unified will leaves little space for participation beyond the affirmation of national unity.
Thus, this model merely replaces the pathologies of rational law with the pathologies of the rational political will.
The second possibility of the relation between law and the political is not to simply invert the asymmetry but to
replace it with the idea of a balance between both sides of the relation. Volk calls this aspect “the dehierarchisation of
the relationship between law and politics” (p. 173). Read in this way, Arendt revives a major insight of republican consti-
tutional theory and reminds us that without the participation of its citizens a constitutional order cannot endure. Volk
rightly argues that the idea of a balance between law and the political, or, for that matter, between the Constitution and
democratic participation, does not involve the kind of argument that Jürgen Habermas presented in his co-originality
thesis. While Habermas is primarily interested in philosophically grounding the legitimacy of a constitutional democ-
racy, Arendt's intention is much closer to a tradition of political theory that is less focused on philosophical justification
than on the concrete question of the conditions needed in order to stabilize an “order of freedom” (Chapter 5). When
Arendt chooses the stability of the political order as a normative reference point, it is not for the sake of order as such
(as, for example, we find in Carl Schmitt), but because it is a condition of freedom. Volk shows how Arendt relates the
validity of the Constitution to the idea of democracy as a form of life. Indeed, this aspect of Arendt brings to mind a spe-
cific position of a political (or republican) liberalism that is not primarily concerned with the philosophical foundation
of justice but that reflects on historical experience and the conditions necessary to ensure a permanent and durable
constitution of freedom. Arendt takes up a topic that has been central in the discourse between liberal and republican
strands of political thought on how to link freedom, political action, and institutions. The Constitution is not a restraint
on, or a limitation of, political action, but its very condition.
Volk's interpretation has the merit of underlining this enabling dimension of political constitutionalism and demon-
strates the inadequacy of using only Arendt's notions of spontaneity, natality, and beginning to argue for a radical
democracy; for we also need to account for the institutional conditions of political action and the creation of polit-
ical power. This well-written volume has a clear structure and gives the reader a rich and innovative interpretation
of Arendt's political and constitutional theory. Volk could have gone even further in his discussion of such classical
institutions as the Supreme Court. When Arendt discusses the topic in “On Revolution” she presents us with a modern
example of the constitutional embodiment of authority, comparing it with the Roman senate. In contrast to the classical
Rawlsian understanding of this institution, Arendt is much closer to Machiavelli's argument in the Discorsi: if one wants
to create a permanent institution one should regularly relink it to its origins. Volk has shown convincingly that the con-
stitutionalism Arendt had in mind is closer to a republican regime of mixed government than to the liberal notion of the
transcendence of rational law.
Daniel Schulz
Technical University Dresden

AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY

Daniel Schulz is Deputy Professor for Political Theory, Technical University Dresden, Germany.